Gov. Terry McAuliffe, whose Department of Elections is named in the suit, said he hopes a federal judge will extend the deadline as the suit suggests, allowing people locked out of the system at Monday's registration deadline to register and vote in the Nov. 8 presidential election. His administration has said repeatedly that it can't simply extend the deadline itself because the deadline is written into state code.

A D.C. group, the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, filed an emergency lawsuit late Tuesday, calling on the federal courts to extend the deadline, much as a judge did in Florida after hurricane damage impacted the last few days of registration there. The group wants another 72 hours of voter registration in Virginia.

A hearing is scheduled for 11 a.m. Thursday in Alexandria, according to the Attorney General's Office, and resolution may come swiftly, particularly with the McAuliffe administration declining to fight the suit. There was also no initial indication Wednesday that Republicans, who hold a majority in the General Assembly, would oppose the extension.

GOP legislative leaders held a public hearing last week to allow local registrars to lay out problems with the state's registration system, called VERIS. It has run slow for weeks, they said, making their work more difficult. It apparently hiccuped badly over the weekend, then broke down nearly completely Monday afternoon, well ahead of the midnight deadline to register to vote in the Nov. 8 presidential election.

The Department of Elections blamed larger-than-expected traffic surges, not just of people trying to register to vote online, but of people checking their registrations and updating their addresses in the system. Republicans blamed the administration for poor management of a crucial system and said warnings from local registrars had not been heeded.

Attorneys for the Lawyers' Committee said thousands of Virginians visited the online portal over the weekend and on Monday, only to have the system fail. Failing to extend the deadline, "imposes a severe burden on the fundamental right to vote by depriving citizens of that right altogether," the lawsuit states.

Elections Commissioner Edgardo Cortés said Tuesday that some people likely were unable to register, but he couldn't estimate how many.

The suit was filed on behalf of the New Virginia Majority Education Fund, which has been registering voters in Virginia with a particular focus on former felons whose rights to vote McAuliffe restored through a series of executive orders this summer and fall. It also names as plaintiffs a Charlottesville couple, Kathy and Michael Kern, who tried and failed to register online Sunday and Monday, according to the suit.

Many former felons are black, the suit argues, and thus a minority class getting extra protection under federal law. Many received notice that their rights were restored only recently, leaving them to rely more heavily on the online registration system, the suit argues, as opposed to visiting a local registrar's office in person or mailing their registration with a postmark by Monday.

The suit states that New Virginia Majority staffers and volunteers were "inundated with calls" because of the state website's failure. In one instance, staff drove to a paralyzed person's home to pick up a registration form and deliver it for him, the lawsuit says.

The state had not formally responded to the suit as of early Wednesday evening, but a spokesman for Attorney General Mark Herring said in an email that, "in light of the significant technical malfunctions that prevented Virginians from registering to vote, the Commonwealth will not object to the request for a temporary extension."

The case was assigned to Senior Judge Claude M. Hilton, a Reagan appointee, in the U.S. Eastern District of Virginia in Alexandria. A hearing had not been set as of early Wednesday evening.